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by crimsonalucard 2470 days ago
Ethics seems arbitrarily

It's a liberal arts thing.. opinionated ideas on how to behave well suited for a thick book with lots of prose. Very hand wavy and requires cultural context.

Science and mathematics on the other hand is more of a description of reality as we know it. It is a logical and cold description that is devoid of bias and the focuses on reality as it is not reality from the human perspective.

The two fields don't really fit together, but both are important. When you drop an atom bomb, science says "E=mc^2" while the liberal arts on ethics says "genocide."

Philosophy feels like a relic of the past. A lot of mathematics and modern science comes from it but it unfortunately includes a lot of more artsy human centric branches of study like religion and morality. Philosophy comes from a time when people thought humans were the heart of the universe and that deep thought on the nature of reality needed to include things humans felt were personally important.

We now know that we humans are a byproduct of natural selection and we're nothing special living on a tiny speck of dust at the edge of the galaxy. Our existence has little effect on the ultimate fate of the universe, the galaxy or let alone the solar system and as such the deep musings on the nature of reality must not include our own experiences in ethics or religion as part of the discussion.

4 comments

You are confusing philosophical ethics with morality a bit.

Ethics includes systematization, description and criticism of moral thought, although I'll admit that, in the real world, it often doesn't draw on science as much as it should.

You might find this interesting for instance:

http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Joshua-D.-Gre...

FYI: science and mathematics are, by definition, part of the seven liberal arts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education#Seven_l...

You're right, maybe I mean the humanities.
When you start learning more about philosophy you realize it forms the bedrock of the accepted ideas in our society. Down to some very common sayings you often hear repeated. It makes its way into daily life all the time.
Sure. "Ideas about society."

Why do we need to combine "Ideas about society" with "Newtons laws of motion" is all I'm saying. One is a liberal art, the other is a formal theory.

You can't unlink them.
Most universities unlink them. That’s why philosophy isn’t a stem major. There is a clear dichotomy in both reality and society.
You don't get it. Its not about where one academic subject sits versus another or how they are taught. It's about the function they both play in daily life. We have science as we have it today because of the developments in philosophy that we have had.

There are 5 fundamental branches of philosophy that attempt to answer 5 questions.

What is real? (Metaphysics) How do I know? (Epistemology) Who/what am I? (Human nature) How should I live? (Ethics) How should we live? (Politics)

In modern society we have taken to answering the question of "how do I know?" by the scientific method. Well, a lot of us have.

Think about recently how the replication crisis has affected our philosophy. We have started to question the methods efficacy in certain disciplines and we are going back to the drawing board. Back to finding a way to answer the question "how do I know?"

Developments in philosophy form the bedrock of daily life. Science is included in that.

My argument is that these branches are not sibling branches.

Metaphysics sits at the root and all the other branches are abstractions on top of that. Like really high on top and centric to the human experience. It's as arbitrary as putting "dog nature" in place of human nature, what justifies human nature to be the foundation as opposed to "dog nature"? Nothing. Hence my argument for why this grouping and the field itself seems illegitimate.

Now, is there a contradiction with "both are important" and "[philosophy is a] relic of the past" (and what that implies, which is, that we can dispense with it)?
Liberal arts is important and philosophy is a relic from the past. Should not combine math and liberal arts which is what philosophy is.